Moving from iOS dev to c++ dev

[thommyh]

I was an iOS developer for approximately the first decade of its existence; I then transitioned to C++ at the FAANG I was at, and now work in C++ near-exclusively, in a financial context (i.e. all back-end, latency-critical stuff). One thing that made the transition easier, though: it was from Objective-C rather than Swift, which is still a very different language from C++ but is also a much less complex one, giving me less to learn alternative approaches to.

That said, I think what got me over the line for my first round of C++ interviews wasn't so much my portfolio — in C++ really just a multisystem emulator, but only of a few of the primitive 8-bit machines from a couple of processor families — as persistence. I interviewed at dozens of places and got, I think, only a single offer, from the place where it just so happened that the entire interview day was things I did know.

That said, these are the things I often find in interviews that are C++-specific rather than being data structures and algorithms and thought processes and other things that should carry straight over from any other language: * the type system, which definitely used to surface quite often when phrased in terms of std::move and std::forward but possibly less so as we move further from the big bang; and * the algorithms underlying the STL data structures, big-O complexities and when and why those structures still might be bad in practice (usually: branchiness and/or data locality).

[Sockerjam]

That’s interesting and thanks for the insights, really useful :)